Yes, here's yet another person jumping on the hate train. This is not an original thought.
I got a Macbook Pro again. A retina 13" from mid 2014. Yes, a 2014 machine in 2018.
Why? Simple. All Macbook Pro's suck at the moment. Either way you lose.
The current line up of 2016/2017 models have flaws: faulty keyboards and no regular USB ports. Now you can say whatever you want about USB-C and how great it is, which it kinda is, but at the moment it is very annoying to have a dongle for everything. - For this 2014 model, the only dongle I might want is a Gigabit Ethernet dongle. It already has 2 regular USB ports and HDMI which is great. - While I pretty much never plug anything in into my laptops (apart from power obviously) it is annoying and stressful having to think about brining a dongle with you, just incase you need it. - Also, Magsafe is much nicer than a stiff USB-C cable. It's so nice to have a indicator light too.
For the keyboard, there have been a ton of reports where keys stop working when tiny particles of dust, crumbs, dirt get stuck under the keys. Also the feel of the keyboard is controversial too, but I personally don't mind it (I had a 12" Macbook and quite liked it.)
Now, while I bought a older model that has more ports and a proven reliable keyboard, it also has some big flaws.
For one thing, it's old, used, slower and the battery is old. The particular model I got is a 2.6 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD. The battery had 248 cycles on it when I got it (the first thing I checked), which isn't great, but also not horrible for a laptop (for a phone it would be very bad.)
The CPU and RAM is fine for my purposes. It's a basically a fancy Twitter machine.
Another thing is that it doesn't support external high resolution displays properly. It can only do up to like 1440p @ 60 Hz. For 4K it can only do it @ 30 Hz, which causes a sharp and pretty but laggy experience on the external display (which isn't horrible, but pretty horrible.)
But apart from that, it's pretty great.
So what do you choose?
A brand new model: - faster - maybe faulty keyboard - a bunch of dongles
or an older model: - slower - has a proven reliable keyboard - has USB and HDMI built-in
I went with the latter because the speed wasn't a concern. But eitherway, you lose.
Let's hope Apple will fix the situation eventually.
But even if they fix the keyboard situation I doubt they will add USB ports back which still makes these older models more appealing, atleast to me.
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